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Zadie Smith

Tuesday | Sept. 19, 2006 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, received numerous awards in Great Britain, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her second novel is The Autograph Man, and her third, On Beauty, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award. Smith is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Washington Post has called her “brilliant…a postmodern Charles Dickens.”

Mary Gaitskill

Monday | Oct. 23, 2006 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Veronica and Two Girls Fat and Thin. Her two collections of stories are Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.

Richard Ford

Friday | Nov. 3, 2006 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Richard Ford is the author of five novels and three collections of short fiction. His novel The Sportswriter (1985) began a fictional cycle that includes Independence Day, recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The New York Times Book Review comments, “With a mastery second to none, Richard Ford has created a character we know as well as our next-door neighbors. Frank Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape.” Ford’s new novel is The Lay of the Land.

Linda Bierds

Thursday | Feb. 15, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Critic William Pritchard has described Linda Bierds as “an original poet whose poems combine fact and dream in surprising and exhilarating ways.” Her seven collections of poetry include First Hand; The Seconds; The Profile Makers; The Ghost Trio; Heart and Perimeter; The Stillness, the Dancing; and Flights of the Harvest-Mare. Recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship as well as grants from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, she teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Reading sponsored by a gift from Florence Newman Trefethen ’43 and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Paula Vogel

Thursday | March 1, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned to Drive received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Her other plays include The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Hot’n’Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven and The Oldest Profession. Her new play is A Civil War Christmas. She has received two OBIES and the 2004 Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Vogel is Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University, where she directs the M.F.A. Playwriting program, and has taught widely in this country and abroad.

J.D. McClatchy

Thursday | March 8, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

J.D. McClatchy’s five books of poems are Hazmat, Ten Commandments, The Rest of the Way, Stars Principal and Scenes from Another Life. His literary essays are gathered in White Paper and Twenty Questions. Editor of The Yale Review, he teaches at Yale University. Poet W.S. Merwin has written of McClatchy’s work, “The complexities and lucid articulation of feeling, the intent awareness, the informed play of language have distinguished each of his books.”

Reading sponsored by a gift from Florence Newman Trefethen ’43 and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Marie Ponsot

Thursday | April 5, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Marie Ponsot’s books of poems include True Minds, Admit Impediment, The Green Dark, The Bird Catcher (recipient of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Springing: New and Selected Poems. A native New Yorker, she has taught in graduate writing programs at Queens College/CUNY, Columbia University and the New School. She received the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal in 2005.

Reading sponsored by a gift from Florence Newman Trefethen ’43 and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Thursday | April 19, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Among Yusef Komunyakaa’s 11 books of poems are Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise; Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award); and Dien Cai Dau. His prose has been collected and published as Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries. Komunyakaa has also received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He teaches at Princeton University.

Reading sponsored by a gift from Florence Newman Trefethen ’43 and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.